EVALUATION: Question 1

Brief Intro:
Our media project called Affliction Of Memory is an opening scene that consists of two main characters that our audience is focusing at, a mother and a child. Our main message that we were trying to address is on a fragile single mum grieving over the loss over her young dead child. A film solely based on a single parent is hardly something you see a lot though it is something that happens on a day to day basis as there are many single parent households. For our film we also focused on the number of emotions the mother had because of her child. You get to see a few emotions of her stressed, emotional, distraught, frustrated and imaginable. Imaginable because at the end of the opening she turns round and appears to believe her daughter is behind her however it is purely just in her imagination. The theme for our thriller opening is a psychological thriller as the storyline generally focuses on the attitudes towards our characters. 


Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The familiar and predictable forms and techniques used by the media to communicate certain ideas or to convey a desired impression is what is defined as conventions. Technical codes include camera angles and sound. Our opening has those technical codes and we also have a few common conventions that is recognisable.Our opening consists of four different elements of conventions that is always present in film openings. These four examples are the use of camera work, Mise en scene, sound and editing.


To portray real media productions in our film opening we used a range of different camera shots such as medium shots, close up shots, over the shoulder shots and long shots. We done this because we wanted to make our film to have a variety of things. We knew camera shots was important because it it is the main thing we are being assessed on. Also we wanted to show an improvement from our last filming task to show that we have gradually improved our camera skills.


Here are examples of the different camera shots in our film opening:

-Medium Close up. This focuses on an individual and you can see the body language of the person and its facial expression.

- Over the shoulder shot

Other real media productions used in our film opening is Mise en scene. We didn't use much Mise en scene as our storyline was simple yet interesting also however we did use mostly props. 

An example of the use of mise en scene for our opening are here; it shows our setting location and there are a few images of what was in the park like the graveyard and the fountain:

This image here is St. Mary's Church, our main filming location where we spend most of our time shooting. 

We had props like the costume of the white dress on the girl, old photos of the girl. cigarettes, an astray and a bottle of wine with the wine glass for the mother. Fake blood was also used on the dead girl's dress.

An example of the use of props are here:

Our opening also has other conventions such as the use of title sequences.


Our sound was taken from sound track pro and we kept it minimum as sound can be distracting. The church bell sound was taken from foley sounds and we created our own soundtrack by merging and mixing it together again provided by soundtrack pro. For evaluating our sound, i believe it is very intense and builds up tension. Lastly the edits we used was a fade in out effect and title credits.